The voiceover whispered of "dark secrets". Only none were forthcoming in The Queen's Hidden Cousins (Channel 4); unless by secrets you include a story that was all over the tabloids in 1987. The only real secret in this film was why the producer had chosen this moment to rake over the shabby treatment of the Queen Mother's two nieces who were born with learning difficulties. And that was clearly a secret never to be revealed.

All we learned was just common knowledge. Katherine and Nerissa Bowes-Lyon, then aged 15 and 22 respectively, had been secretly placed in Earlswood mental hospital in 1941 by their parents and had, to all intents and purposes, been abandoned. There is no record of either woman ever receiving a family visit and in the 1963 edition of Burke's Peerage the royal family claimed that both women had died in 1961 when in fact they were both still alive. Nerissa died in 1986 with just a few nurses attending her burial in a pauper's grave and it was her death that prompted the media feeding frenzy the following year. To round it off, the Queen Mother was a patron of the mental health charity, Mencap.

It was – and is – a fairly shocking story of neglect, but this programme had nothing to add to it and you could almost hear the producers scrabbling around for extra material to bulk out and sensationalise the hour. So every now and again the programme would be punctuated with archive footage of a grand royal occasion, before cutting to the same two – presumably the only two – still photographs of the Bowes-Lyon women, with the narrator expressing his horror that they hadn't been invited. This sequence started with the Queen's own wedding in 1947 and, bizarrely, ended with that of William and Kate this year. Just imagine if the 85-year old Katherine had made her first ever public appearance on the Buckingham Palace balcony: that would have been abusive.

In between all this, we were treated to panoramic exterior shots of Earlswood – long since closed down and converted to luxury flats – with a Harry Potterish soundtrack (with a massive leap of the imagination you could say there was a resemblance between Earlswood and Hogwarts) and the not-very-enlightening reminiscences of several former patients and members of staff. "She was a bit naughty, a bit of a character," said one. "I'd look after them, get them dressed and give them their medicine," said another. Who would have thought?

None of this would have mattered so much if there had been any attempt to discover why the two women were placed in care in 1941, as this was the one part of the story that was genuinely still a mystery. One ex-nurse suggested the family had probably begun to find them a bit difficult. But why, when the women were aged 15 and 22? If the family had stayed together for that long, what was the breaking point? It must have been something quite dramatic. Surely someone must have noticed that the women had disappeared. Maybe the royal family's apathy towards Katherine and Nerissa was catching.

Answers were also in short supply in Waking Up To Insomnia (ITV1), though in this case not for the want of asking. According to the Great British Sleep Survey, more than 50% of the country suffers in varying degrees from insomnia but no one really seems to be any the wiser as to why. Some claim it's to do with stress, others that it's random, while a Dutch scientist reckons it may have something to do with the front part of some people's brain being a bit thinner. As a long-term insomniac myself, I rather switched off when they dragged out a bloke who hadn't slept a wink for a year without anyone pointing out this was a physical impossibility. Then, as my wife will tell you, there's nothing more boring than hearing about other people's sleeplessness.

Rather more fun was Symphony (BBC4), which this week featured Brahms, Mahler, Dvorak and Tchaikovsky. Various musos I know have been a bit sniffy about this series but I have enjoyed it thoroughly and found Simon Russell Beale and Mark Elder ideal guides. The only annoyance has been that much of the music has necessarily had to be cut short. So how about an unedited version for all us insomniacs? Programmes could start at 4am and run through until breakfast.